Beyond the Occult: Twenty Years' Research into the Paranormal

Beyond the Occult: Twenty Years' Research into the Paranormal

Colin Wilson

Language: English

Pages: 528

ISBN: 1905857837

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

Colin Wilson has explored the paranormal universe ever since he researched his first highly successful work, The Occult: “the most interesting, informative and thought-provoking book on the subject.”* Now, 20 years later, he offers an even wider examination of the mystical and paranormal. And what he has produced is amazing—a thoroughly convincing general theory of the occult. Wilson powerfully posits that our so-called “normal” experience may in fact be subnormal, and that evolution has brought us near the edge of a quantum leap into a hugely expanded human consciousness. Combining fascinating glimpses into the paranormal world with the latest scientific thinking on the nature of “physical reality,” he reveals the usually unseen powers of the human mind and discusses why he has become convinced that disembodied spirits do exist.*Sunday Telegraph

family living in the small town of Jabuticabal were visited by what Playfair calls ‘one of the most persistently malevolent poltergeists in history’. It began with stone-throwing — or rather brick-throwing. A spiritist named Volpe came to survey the situation and decided that the focus of the activity was a pretty eleven-year-old girl named Maria José Ferreira, a natural medium who was unconsciously lending the spirits her energy. He took the girl into his own home and soon bricks were flying

an image of a demon carved from an old tyre. He managed to place it under their bed, and they began to lose their energy and bleed from the nose and mouth. The young couple found the bottle and took it to Daskalos, who performed one of his rituals and cut off the connection between the demon and the young couple: their bleeding immediately ceased. Such a story would sound like the wildest absurdity were it not that Playfair witnessed so many similar cases in Brazil. The implication seems to be

to be possible to divide it into these points — or at least to imagine it divided into points. But no matter how many points I divide it into I can still imagine billions more points — in fact an infinite number — between them. In theory my pencil should take an infinite amount of time to draw it. Obviously there is something badly wrong with my reason, which tells me that a line consists of points. The same applies to time. How long does twelve o’clock last for? It doesn’t last for any period of

investigates poltergeists in Brazil. Black magic centres. David St Clair is bewitched. The girl who was driven to suicide by a poltergeist. The story of Marcia and the statue of Yemanja. Why the ‘paranormal’ is always unbelievable. My reassessment of witchcraft. The North Berwick witches. Witchcraft in Africa. Was the Rosenheim poltergeist the spirit of a murdered girl? The case of the bewitched housewife. Montague Summers and his views on witchcraft. The Shaman Ramon Medina. Steiner and the ages

he feels he is walking on clouds. But when, the next morning, he has to get up in the freezing dawn and make his way to school through the dark, icy streets, his despair is twice as deep because he has experienced ecstasy the night before. It then seemed to me that the problem of human existence can be expressed very simply. At long intervals, we experience moments of strength and happiness in which we feel that we have the power to change the world and our own lives. But such moments are brief.